In CDMA systems, a MS (mobile station) accesses the CDMA system on a particular carrier frequency. A single carrier frequency occupies 1.25 MHz in bandwidth, and provides capacity for a number of calls to proceed simultaneously in the same cell. Each carrier has associated with it a single paging channel and a plurality of traffic channels. The channels of a given carrier occupy the same frequency bandwidth and are differentiated from each other by a series of different orthogonal codes.
When a carrier reaches its capacity limit, it is desirable to increase the capacity of the system. One way of achieving this is to increase the number of carriers to greater than one, thereby creating a multi-carrier system.
In existing multi-carrier systems, a MS is capable of tuning to only one of the carrier frequencies at any instant in time. Because of this, the MS is only listening to one of the carrier frequency paging channels. In order to page a MS, the page must be sent on the paging channel of all of the carrier frequencies to ensure that it is sent on the paging channel the MS is listening to. To do this, the page message must be duplicated for each of the paging channels on which the message is to be sent. This results in an inefficient utilization of paging channel resources.